Here's a picture of a peaceful Russian village from the beginning of a randomly generated test battle today. The map is called "Merefa" by our team member who has the handle "Benpark" here on the forums.

Here's a little sequence of screenshots showing off a couple of new features. This is from the "Assault of the 169th" scenario some of you may be familiar with from Kharkov, but I would bet you never took out one of those bothersome Pak 38s like this before! If you have a spare tank, this works pretty well.

The edges of the gun pit barely slow the T-34 down. You can't see from this picture, but it's barrelling in at full speed. I set it a Charge course with waypoints to come around the flank of the gun pit while the other two T-34s approached from the front. Yes, there are other ways to take out an AT gun, but this is one of them.

The gun crew was turning the gun, but they couldn't swing it around in time. Note also that not all destroyed tanks explode now and we've got some improved special effects for those that do. But an AT gun overrun by a Tank ends to have a bad day. On this map, there are some anti-tank mines between the Soviet tanks and the German AT guns, but I managed to get through without serious problems.

I took the other PaK 38 out with artillery, which cost me fewer tanks (lost 3 T-34s to this one in total - one right when it opened up on me and the other two during the Charge), but this was more fun.

I should note again that last sequence was on one of the older maps and scenarios, though it has been updated and works fine with Panzer Command: Ostfront. The maps still look good, but if you compare that one to the first screenshot I posted you can also see how much nicer the new maps can be.

So will we be able to make the combat message log less verbose? Or, better yet, adjust it's size to take up less screen space?

It seems like it's taking up a lot of area.

I just checked Eriks screens and the answer to your question is yes. the Message log is very configurable. Erik has his toggled to show more information. you can toggle the msg log box to pretty large (larger than you see in shots), but also to make it smaller - basicly small enough to just show the four button controls. OR you can toggle it entirely off.